People are always asking, “What should I wear for my portrait session?” , so here are some ideas and tips. First of all…forget the white. A little bit is ok, but what you really need to pop your photos is COLOR! Not just a bunch of random colors, but a palette that is coordinated and will draw the eye to the subject of the photo, which is you!

First, you need a color scheme. The easiest way to pick this is by simply browsing your stores to see what color palettes are in style/season. For example, corals and bright blues, like turquoise are big colors for Spring 2011. Maybe you should start with picking what you will wear and build from that. In the example for Spring/Summer, we chose a coral dress with a pattern to be our “inspiration piece”. Once you have this item, you can use it to find the outfits for other members of your family.

Dads can be a little harder, since they tend to want to wear khakis and a button down, but encourage them to wear some color as well. Even if it’s not an exact color match, you can find colors that will accent the palette, like the yellow print shirt we found for the Dad in our example.

We brought in the turquoise in the Boy’s shirt and paired it with a neutral short. For the Girl’s outfit, we used a coral sweater to repeat the color in the Mom’s outfit. Then we concentrated on accessories: a turquoise necklace for mom, turquoise headband for the Girl and sneakers with a coral/orange color on them for Dad.

Because the Mom’s dress has a large print on it, we didn’t want a bunch of other prints to fight with it, so we went with solids, simple stripes (on the Girl’s sweater) and a smaller, tone on tone print in the Dad’s shirt.